It Is Not the Journey But the Destination: Endpoint Conditioned Trajectory Prediction

Human trajectory forecasting with multiple socially interacting agents is of critical importance for autonomous navigation in human environments, e.g., for self-driving cars and social robots. In this work, we present Predicted Endpoint Conditioned Network (PECNet) for flexible human trajectory prediction. PECNet infers distant trajectory endpoints to assist in long-range multi-modal trajectory prediction. A novel non-local social pooling layer enables PECNet to infer diverse yet socially compliant trajectories. Additionally, we present a simple “truncation-trick” for improving diversity and multi-modal trajectory prediction performance. We show that PECNet improves state-of-the-art performance on the Stanford Drone trajectory prediction benchmark by \({\sim }20.9\%\) and on the ETH/UCY benchmark by \({\sim }40.8\%\) (Code available at project homepage: https://karttikeya.github.io/publication/htf/).